The Tainted Love of a Captain

by Jane Lark

  ‘Where is Charlie now?’ Katherine asked.

  ‘Asleep in our room. I gave her laudanum. She should sleep for a few hours.’

  ‘Do you wish me to go and sit with her?’

  He shook his head. He had no idea how Charlie might react to others if she woke. ‘She would probably rather not face you now. But I am going to go to Brighton tomorrow and see if I can stop Hillier without shooting him or slicing my sword through him. Please do not let her into your room so she is not tempted again, and tell the others the same, Kate, and watch over her for me.’

  ‘I will come with you,’ John stated.

  ‘No. I would rather go alone. You may help, as you said, send people to fetch her family and bring them here. Thank you.’

  ‘Where do they live?’

  Damn. ‘I do not know. So it will have to wait until the morning when she wakes and can tell me the address.’

  ‘We should go down to dinner,’ Katherine said. ‘Everyone will be waiting.’

  ‘You will have to excuse me. I am not in the mood to give people fake smiles and talk polite nonsense to pretend all is well.’

  Katherine came forward and touched Harry’s arm in a gesture of sympathy and understanding. ‘I will make up some reason why you are not there. You are only two days’ married, you have a good excuse to want to be with your wife.’

  Except that he could not stomach being with his wife at this moment.

  ‘Do not worry,’ John added.

  He bowed his head at Katherine and then to John, in the way he had of dealing with his brother that was far more usual than an embrace. ‘Thank you. I will speak to you before I leave tomorrow and tell you where her family live.’

  John nodded.

  Harry turned away and let himself out of the room as the two of them returned to their dressing room.

  He ignored the opportunity to return to the bedchamber and walked downstairs. The laudanum would have knocked Charlie out. She would not know if he was there or not.

  The footman who stood in the hall looked up. Harry did not meet his gaze, he ignored him as he walked on down the last few steps. Then ignored the noise of conversation coming from the drawing room and instead turned to the library. He knew where John kept his cigars and decanters.

  He let himself into the library and shut the door on the footman. A full-length portrait of Katherine looked down on him from the far wall as he walked across the room. He had always deemed John self-righteous, yet his brother had a good heart—and a good wife—which probably revealed more of the truth about John than anything that came from his mouth.

  Harry lit a cigar, selected a bulbous glass, then he picked up the decanter of brandy by its neck and carried it and the glass back out of the room. The easiest way into the garden was via the drawing room, but that was currently full of the people he wanted to avoid and so he went to the front door and stopped, waiting for the footman to open it.

  The man came forward and did so.

  ‘Thank you. But please do not tell anyone where I am.’

  The man nodded.

  Harry walked out.

  The problem with John’s grounds was that they were too open. People could see you from the windows easily, with everything being meadow.

  He walked towards the lake. Hopefully his family were all too busy talking in the drawing room and they would not see him walking away.

  He lifted the cigar to his lips and sucked in the smoke, thinking about Charlie sharing cigars with him. There was an issue, a problem with this. The woman had done it. She had smashed the stone from about his heart and now she was within it.

  It was as though she had come into his life to make him learn everything he had refused to accept from anyone else. He cared beyond any perception he had held of that emotion. Love… It was clawing at him and tearing him apart and she appeared to be such a strong woman – when she was not strong at all. The woman who had boldly watched him in Brighton and smoked cigars and laughed over a glass of whiskey was a ruse. Inside, he knew, she was still that hurt fourteen-year-old girl, a girl he did not know how to help and who did not trust him.

  The only experience he had to apply to this was what he had learned from the men he had been in charge of. Lessons learned from the things he had done wrong. Mostly, day after day he had held his sword high and called for them to race to their potential deaths, not saved them. But once he had tried to save a man. He had failed.

  He did not want to fail Charlie. He had to help her mind heal.

  When he was quite a few yards away from the house, he stopped just beyond the brow of the hill and sat down, he hoped in a position where no one on the ground floor of the house might be able to spot him. Yet if Charlie looked out of their bedroom window she would be able to see him.

  With his cigar hanging from his lips, he poured a glass of the brandy, then set the decanter down in the grass and with his free hand unbuttoned his coat. His elbows rested on his bent knees.

  His family was a myriad of love matches, he ought to have been prepared. He ought to understand, yet he had never realised how much pain came with love, love had made him stand in Charlie’s shoes and look through her eyes and he had seen a different way of life that he’d chosen to ignore before. That world… That world appalled him. He wanted to right every wrong that had been done to her. To take his revenge on Hillier, her brother, her mother—the whole damn village full of people who had hurt and forced her into a foul choice.

  He shut his eyes as his mind cried ‘charge’ and the thunder of the horses’ hooves and battle cries roared about him as cannon fire boomed through the air.

  His free hand lifted, he saw blood on it, blood from the past, but ignored that and let his hand comb through his hair. It was a gesture that implied his inability to do what he wanted. That was what was hurting, that he would, for the rest of his life, have to know what he knew and do nothing. Thank God he would be in India.

  He sucked on the cigar and thought of Charlie and drank and watched the sun set. Trying not to think of Charlie with Hillier. Trying not to remember the war. Perhaps he should have dosed himself with laudanum rather than her? Whose demons was he fighting?

  ‘Harry! What are you doing out here?’

  Damn. The sun was only peeking over the horizon, drawing a line of orange across the lake. He turned and rose, serenaded by the chorus of the evening’s crescendo of bird song. He must have been out here for a couple of hours or more, entirely lost in thoughts of the past and the future.

  Three people walked towards him from the direction of the drawing room and he could see that the French doors were open. He must not have been as out of sight as he’d hoped and yet his scarlet coat was probably a beacon in the sunset.

  It was Rob, Drew and Henry who came towards him. ‘What are you doing?’ Rob repeated.

  ‘Drinking,’ Harry stated in a slurred pitch.

  ‘We were told you and Charlie had hidden away,’ Rob said, as they came closer.

  ‘So what the hell are you doing out here alone?’ Henry added.

  ‘Sulking,’ Harry answered, then laughed at himself. It was a sorry sound.

  Rob frowned. ‘Have you two argued?’

  ‘Not as you might think.’ He lifted his glass. ‘If you had brought glasses you could have joined me.’

  ‘You are drunk,’ Drew laughed.

  ‘Sometimes in life it is better to be drunk than sober. Liquor silences the world.’

  ‘Well, I will join you in silencing it. I am not averse to drinking from a decanter.’ Henry walked past Harry and leant down to pick the decanter up.

  Harry smiled and shook his head. He and Henry had spent years together getting drunk regularly—and bedding whores too—but those were the sort of memories he was drinking into silence.

  ‘Shall we sit with you?’ Drew proposed.

  ‘As you desire.’

  Rob slung an arm about Harry’s shoulders, turning him back to face the lake. ‘What is distressing you? You
must talk about it. I owe you a debt for the times you have listened to me, so you must let me return the favour and pour out what is troubling you.’

  ‘Sit and talk to us,’ Drew said.

  This was what his family did. When someone needed aid, they rallied. He would not be surprised if John had been the one who’d spotted Harry and sent the others outside with some carefully posed hint.

  The four of them sat then, in the long grass, the scent of clover rising on the cooling night air around them as the sun disappeared beyond the far bank of the lake. There was a bright moon; they could see easily.

  ‘Is it the war?’ Rob asked in a quiet voice. ‘You have been different since you returned.’

  He’d known that it had been noticed. Lord. ‘I wish it was only that.’ Which was a terrible thought. The memories pierced his head even as he said it and yet there was a vision of Charlie with the scarlet bruise about her eye too.

  ‘If not that, what is it, then?’ Drew asked as he accepted the decanter from Henry. He drank from it.

  ‘Where is Charlie?’ Henry asked before Harry could answer.

  ‘Sleeping.’ Harry finished the brandy in his glass, then held his glass out to Drew so he could refill it. Rob did not accept the decanter when Drew offered it. He passed it back to Henry.

  ‘Does anyone wish for a cigar?’ Drew offered. ‘I had the foresight to bring some out.’

  Harry smiled. ‘Thank you. Is this the cavalry charge coming in to save me?’

  ‘Do you need saving?’ Drew asked, as he pulled the cigars out of his pocket.

  Harry looked at Drew and caught Henry’s and Rob’s gaze too. ‘Yes.’ It was strange to admit it. He had always been the one boosting their spirits in the past.

  ‘To begin with, tell us why you are not upstairs with Charlie?’ Rob said in his honest way that cut through everything anyone else would hide with subterfuge.

  ‘Because I do not feel able to face her.’

  ‘Why?’

  He looked at them all. He and Rob had always been different and yet always friends and he had once stood beside Rob when Rob had shot a man to protect Caro. Then there was Henry. Henry had been his closest friend and confidant for years, and Drew, Drew was his older brother as much as John or Rob, just not by blood. ‘She left another man to come to me.’

  ‘The instigator of her black eye…’ Drew stated, before taking another swig of the brandy.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And…’ Rob pressed.

  Harry focused on Rob. ‘He wants her back.’ Rob would know what that meant. That was why he’d shot a man for Caro’s sake.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Rob asked.

  ‘That is what has led me away from her and left me sitting out here. I know what I want to do. I want to kill the man, but that is not an option. I would be standing before a firing squad if I did that. So instead I must find a way to talk sense into him.’

  ‘And you think he will listen,’ Drew said. ‘He cannot have done so, so far, if he is threatening her.’

  ‘Then there is only one answer. We face him together,’ Henry declared.

  Harry actually laughed. ‘You would have us track the man down like a posse, shouting ‘hang him high’. Like a witch hunt…’

  Henry and Drew laughed.

  ‘And drag him out of his house and parade him down the street as a villain,’ Rob added.

  Drew handed Harry a lit cigar.

  Harry wrapped an arm around Rob’s shoulders. ‘I am gratified by your outrage. But this is not your problem and you are now a politician with a reputation to uphold, you cannot drag the man out of his house.’ He chuckled. The liquor and his friends were working their charms. ‘But you may drink with me and help me drown my sorrows out of sight from anyone who cares about your upstanding nature.’ Harry reached over and grasped the decanter from Drew’s hand then held it up before Rob.

  Rob smiled and took it. ‘For the sake of the brother whom I love.’ He drank from the decanter.

  Love. The word lanced Harry, twisting in through the cracks Charlie had allowed to form, making a way into his heart. He had loved his family carelessly, without thought, when he was young. Now love seemed to hold a heavy price. It hurt. It was not thoughtless or careless, it absorbed everything.

  ‘I may, and will, ride there with you.’ Henry stated. ‘No matter what we do when we arrive. Even if it is to simply tell him he is a reprehensible man.’

  Laughter erupted from Harry’s throat, as he imagined them standing before Hillier, side by side, and waving fingers of aggression to tell him what a bad man he was. It was the sort of tomfoolery they would have got up to when they were young.

  ‘And I will travel with you,’ Drew added.

  Harry recalled the anger that had erupted from his throat at Charlie. He should not have railed at her this afternoon. This was not her fault. She had simply been as bewildered for an answer as he was.

  Harry sighed out a breath. He was too drunk now to plan for the morning at all, but he would not deny himself the company on his journey to Brighton.

  John had offered too, but like Rob, John could not become involved in anything sordid and yet the power of a duke… what might that do to bind Hillier in some sort of chains? He must consider that when he was sober.

  Chapter 13

  Charlie rose. Her mind was spinning from the laudanum and it made the room sway as she stood. She had dreamt of the day she’d accepted a ride in Mark’s carriage. She had dreamt of the parlour in his house and the cake and the kiss and his hands touching her and every painful thing that came next. She could not allow her sister to suffer it.

  She laced her corset before her and tried to turn it and tighten it, but it could not be done. She rang for a maid. A man came first. But she sent him away to fetch someone to help her dress.

  She had to go to Brighton.

  She could not let it happen to Ginny.

  Years ago she had sacrificed everything so that Ginny could be happy.

  Her gaze turned to the window as she tried to guess what hour it was. Her limbs felt heavy with laudanum as she walked over and looked out. She had not drunk the full dose in the bottle, but even so the drug had dulled her mind. She needed to think. The sun was already setting, it barely showed above the horizon.

  When she looked down she saw Harry. He was sitting on the grass, surrounded by three of the men in his family. He should have gone. Instead he was sitting there drinking.

  He had promised tomorrow, but tomorrow might be too late and if she told him that she was going he would make her wait. She could not wait.

  A knock struck the door.

  The muscles in Charlie’s body jumped.

  ‘Mrs Marlow…’

  It was the maid.

  ‘Come in,’ Charlie called. ‘Please help me dress quickly,’ she said as the woman came into the room. ‘I want to go downstairs and join my husband.’

  Her heart beat with the same sickening pace as it had done the day she had walked from her home to the Hilliers’ house, to offer herself in exchange for charity to be given to her family.

  This time, when she left the house she had nothing bar the clothes she wore and again she left unseen through the front door as the servants were all engaged in clearing up after the family’s meal, or serving them in the drawing room. She did not walk along the drive, though. When she had told a woman at the inn this afternoon that she had come from the Duke’s estate, she had been told of a quicker way across the park to reach the village, her marker to finding her way was a tall folly.

  She looked for it on the horizon and saw it in the distance, peeping above a copse that was crowned with moonlight. She ran towards it, the skirt of her dress clasped in one hand. She hoped the ticket to Brighton that she had bought this morning would be honoured.

  ~

  Harry rose with the sun, in the way of a soldier on campaign.

  He had slept in his clothing, as he would have done on campaign, too, on a so
fa in the library so that he would not disturb Charlie.

  The clock across the room chimed five times as he stood. His mind was heavy from the remnants of liquor. He ran a hand over his eyes, stretched and then decided to go upstairs and check on Charlie. He did not go into the bedroom, though. Instead he decided to freshen up first, it was still very early. He opened the door of the washing and dressing room that was beside their bedchamber and went directly in there.

  He pushed his braces off so that they hung down from his waist, then stripped off his shirt and made use of the jug of water and the bowl on the washstand to freshen himself and shave. Then he pulled a clean shirt over his head and tied a neckcloth about the collar. After he’d slid his braces back on he picked up his coat. The man in the mirror looked more like a soldier as he slotted the brass buttons into their holes. He leant then and opened the connecting door. Ash came through it before it was very wide, but there was no sound beyond her movement. He shut the door again without looking inside. If Charlie was still asleep, he ought to leave her. He would go for a ride and take Ash out for an hour or so. Then he would wake her.

  When Harry walked into the courtyard, he faced a place full of activity. The grooms and stable lads were putting out the feed for the horses.

  ‘Shall I fetch your horse, sir?’

  ‘No need. I will fetch her myself.’ He walked past the man who had offered to help, to the stall Obsidian stood in. Obsidian had heard his voice and looked out. ‘Hello girl.’ He patted her neck as he opened the stall. When Obsidian’s head turned, he kissed the animal’s muzzle. Truthfully, if he had a first love, it was Obsidian. She had brought him through a war and yet it was Charlie who had made him understand love as no one else had.

  Harry put on Obsidian’s bridle and then her saddle. Then led her out.

  A groom came forward and held Obsidian’s reins as Harry mounted, not that he had need of the help. He thanked the man with a lift of his hand as the man tilted his cap, then Harry walked the horse out of the stables and broke the animal into a gallop.